Chapters meeting 2010/Documentation/Outreach I

Recruiting new editors (Frank Schulenburg)

"Public Outreach" > renamed "New Editor Relations"

• Support new editors through their first 100 edits
• 5-year-plan, priority for year one:

Public Policy Initiative

http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Public_Policy_Initiative

assumptions:

• Students are the "fuel" of Wikipedia
• Wikipedia is a great teaching tool
  • encourage universities and professors to use Wikipedia for teaching
  • gain users/editors:
    • students write articles
    • learn by editing

What is "Public Policy"?

• a collaborative dicipline in U.S. schools and institutions
• well suited field to start Outreach with
• a topic area
  • laws and legal structure
  • how does government serve the people
  • e.g. "Clear Water Act", Health Care

Roles

• Foundation: Develops a model and infrastructure
• Chapters: Actual outreach

Model

• Goal: Developing a model that can be replicated by others
• experimental project; documentation on everything is needed
• can be found on the outreach-wiki
• first project: two semesters at 5-7 schools (Harvard, Indiana, George Washington,...)

Infrastructure

• Sample Lesson Plans/Projects
• Live Chat
• Mentoring Programm
• ...

Phase One

• planning outreach:
  • outreach to key institutons in the field of public policy (finished)
  • meeting with professors; talk about interests, topics and content
  • evaluation of the results of the outreach phase (finished)
  • development of educational materials (in process)

Phase Two

• quality-improvement
  • assessment of the current status of public policy articles on Wikipedia
  • Training of Wikipedia Campus Ambassadors: people that work to the classrooms
  • hands-on Wikipedia workshops
  • improvements of articles
  • evaluation and documentation

http://tinyurl.com/publicpolicyinitiative

• Proposals for funds to have chapter reps travel to PPI sites to observe and ask questions
• idea of helpdesk/live help that helps immediately
• ambassadors to train people or classrooms
• For now, this project does not include Wikisource

Britain loves Wikipedia (case study)

• Slides

Photo competition by WM-UK

• collaboration with 20 museums in the UK
• GLAMs involed: 20 museums, galleries, etc.
• competition: Who makes the best pictures?

Promotion/Advertising

• leaflet to navigate people
  • institutions involved
  • instructions
  • prizes
  • themes
  • links
• own wiki; http://britianloveswikipedia.org
  • information on project
  • own upload system
    • button "Upload" on first page
    • Easy uploader: 2 pics and data at once
    • uploading via Flickr
    • confirmation of authentic photos by museums

Results

• reasonable, but far from overwhelming
  • 584 photos uploaded; 25 declined by museums (Category: Britain_Loves_Wikipedia)
  • V&A: nad Postal Archive were the best attended (50-60 people at each event)
  • some museums with no photos

Comparison

• wiki loves art (US and UK): ~10k photos
• Wiki Loves Art/NL ~5k photos; 46 museums
• NL used flickr: as photographer communitie; easy upload tools
• NL had an approval process before uploading to commons

Problems

• lack of publicity (little media takeup, no external advertising)
• lack of visibility (in museums, on wiki, e.g. sitenotice)
• geographical: museums in remote areas
• possible reasons
  • not reaching correct audience currently?
  • cannot find people living close to remote museums
  • difficult user interface that does not attract non-Wiki audience
  • photo confirmation took time, did not appear right away
• potential solutions
  • develop a core group of participants to guarantee events

• Israel Project: A 1000 words http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Elef_Millim_project

• Ideas
  • Wiki Loves Art International
  • Wiki Takes The World, May 2011
    • Coincides (approx) 10 year anniversary of Wikipedia going multilingual (de+cat 16 March, f 11 May, then language landslide...)